Jewish National Fund: 120 years of colonial chutzpah
Israeli authorities demolish what remains of the Khader family home in the Shuafat neighbourhood of East Jerusalem on 16 January 2023
Joseph Massad writes in Middle East Eye:
The Zionist movement’s major financial and colonial arm, the Jewish National Fund (JNF), long active in taking over Palestinian lands and evicting and expelling Palestinians, is currently suing Palestine solidarity groups in the US for daring to resist its colonial predations against the Palestinian people.
A US federal judge had dismissed the suit in 2021 for lack of evidence. However, the JNF appealed the decision last month.
The JNF along with American Israelis brought a lawsuit in 2019 against the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights seeking financial damages over the organisation’s support for the non-violent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement (BDS), alleging that its coordinating body, the BDS National Committee, is a “front for terrorist groups”.
Equally important is that the JNF lawsuit is seeking compensation from the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights for the latter’s support of the “Stop the JNF” international campaign protesting the Fund’s activities, widely considered to be racist and colonial. The JNF case utilises the 1996 US Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which allows victims of terrorism to seek compensatory damages under an order of restitution in a federal civil court.
Material support
The JNF was established in 1901 as a financial arm of the Zionist Organisation (ZO), which was founded four years earlier, to plan for the colonisation of Palestine by Jews.
In 1899, the ZO created the Jewish Colonial Trust, which in turn set up a subsidiary in Palestine in 1902 named the Anglo-Palestine Bank. In 1908, the JNF established its own subsidiary, the Palestine Land Development Company, which set out to drive Palestinian peasants off their land by acquiring land from the Ottoman authorities and big absentee landlords in Beirut, Damascus, and Cairo. The JNF’s main task was to fundraise in Jewish communities for the purpose of taking over the land of the Palestinians – a key activity that continues today.
Another JNF subsidiary front, called Himanuta, has been entrusted in recent years with executing legally questionable land deals in the West Bank. The racist anti-Palestinian colonial policy of the ZO and the JNF led the latter to choose the German Jewish Arthur Ruppin, already a JNF member, to head its efforts to acquire land in Palestine.
Born in Posen, a Polish-majority province under German occupation and a German settler colony, Ruppin, fancied himself a race scientist and held racialist views of peoples, including Jews and “Jewish types”. He became central to the Zionist colonisation of Palestine.
Soon after his arrival in Palestine in 1907 on a JNF-funded trip to explore Jewish colonisation, Ruppin wrote to the JNF that he saw “the work of the JNF as being similar to that of the [Prussian] Colonisation Commission working in Posen and Western Prussia. The JNF will buy land whenever it is offered by non-Jews and will offer it for resale either partly or wholly to Jews”.